As they reached the sandy embankment, Slub Glub stepped off of the final crab in the chain of vacating crustaceans, and saw the reason for their massive pink exodus. The beach was fraught with danger. Human beings in garish-colored swim trunks were riding surfboards that collided with the ocean, each other, and all manner of sea creature. On the sandy beach there was a constant hubbub of people as they played strange games with nets and balls and engaged in oblique mating rituals involving strange lotions and awkward squawking. Children were re-shaping the surface of the dunes with sharp pails, further disrupting the peace and sending the small pink crabs scuttling for the deep water and their eventual squid-ish demise.
Slub Glub noticed a sedentary female of the species, seemingly comatose on a horizontal chair, smeared with glistening ointment. Slub Glub thought she might be someone’s meal, as the always-angry sun was turning her a golden brown, and the oils smeared across her seemed to hasten the process. Seeing a faint resemblance between this creature and himself, Slub Glub ventured forth to inquire what had brought everyone to this un-hospitable spot and to engage in such disruptive behavior.
“Excuse me,” Slub Glub said tentatively. The creature’s eyes were closed and it was making a fierce, rumbling, repetitive exhalation, which sounded like chainsaws. Slub Glub touched the thing’s shoulder gently, then jumped back as it rumbled to life with a snort. The human squinted at Slub Glub.
“Be a dear and rub some more lotion on my back, will you?” it muttered, holding a bottle of ointment towards Slub Glub, whom it had mistaken for one of its children. Slub Glub peered into the bottle of lotion and was about to take a sip when Willowmina appeared and knocked it out of his hand.
“Don’t drink that! We don’t know, it might make us like them,” she warned. “I hear the sound of a drum beating, let’s go see if it’s the Baron again.”
To be continued.
Table of Contents: “Slub Glub in the Weird World of the Weeping Willows”
Get the graphic novel from Eraserhead Press.
Illustration & text copyright (c) Andrew Goldfarb